imsical idleness of our gentry! I'm ready to
repeat it for thirty thousand years. We don't know how to live by our
own labour. And as for the fuss they're making now about the 'dawn'
of some sort of public opinion, has it so suddenly dropped from heaven
without any warning? How is it they don't understand that before we
can have an opinion of our own we must have work, our own work, our own
initiative in things, our own experience. Nothing is to be gained for
nothing. If we work we shall have an opinion of our own. But as we
never shall work, our opinions will be formed for us by those who have
hitherto done the work instead of us, that is, as always, Europe, the
everlasting Germans--our teachers for the last two centuries. Moreover,
Russia is too big a tangle for us to unravel alone without the Germans,
and without hard work. For the last twenty years I've been sounding the
alarm, and the summons to work. I've given up my life to that appeal,
and, in my folly I put faith in it. Now I have lost faith in it, but I
sound the alarm still, and shall sound it to the tomb. I will pull at
the bell-ropes until they toll for my own requiem!"

"Alas! We could do nothing but assent. We applauded our teacher and with
what warmth, indeed! And, after all, my friends, don't we still hear
to-day, every hour, at every step, the same "charming," "clever,"
"liberal," old Russian nonsense? Our teacher believed in God.

"I can't understand why they make me out an infidel here," he used to
say sometimes. "I believe in God, _mais distinguons_, I believe in Him as
a Being who is conscious of Himself in me only. I cannot believe as my
Nastasya (the servant) or like some country gentleman who believes 'to
be on the safe side,' or like our dear Shatov--but no, Shatov doesn't
come into it. Shatov believes 'on principle,' like a Moscow Slavophil.
As for Christianity, for all my genuine respect for it, I'm not a
Christian. I am more of an antique pagan, like the great Goethe, or
like an ancient Greek. The very fact that Christianity has failed to
understand woman is enough, as George Sand has so splendidly shown in
one of her great novels. As for the bowings, fasting and all the rest
of it, I don't understand what they have to do with me. However busy the
informers may be here, I don't care to become a Jesuit. In the year 1847
Byelinsky, who was abroad, sent his famous letter to Gogol, and warmly
reproached him for believing in some sort of God. _En